Mentee vs. Minion
Working with undergrads as a graduate student
I know from personal experience how much an undergraduate research experience can shape your future. At the end of my junior year in undergrad at Swarthmore College, I was struggling with the idea of what to do after college and how my major (physics, at the time) would help me achieve that. That summer, […]
Making Whoopie (Pies)
Baking as a stress relief from the rigor of MIT academics
When you think of things a graduate student might do to relieve stress, baking and assembling 90 whoopie pies probably doesn’t make the cut. Here’s the scene: every surface of my apartment is covered in misshapen disks of chocolate cake. I plop fluffy whipped cream onto the disks and sandwich them together—careful to not let […]
Glowing Green Goo
Why we think all radioactive materials glow
What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word “radioactive”? For many people, this word conjures up images of ominously glowing material. In the opening credits to The Simpsons, a running gag is Homer’s mishandling of a glowing green bar of radioactive material. As someone who works with a fair bit […]
Graduate Women Explore a Path to Professorship
Learn more about the Path of Professorship program. Every November, I join a planning team of graduate students, postdocs, and the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education to offer a two-day workshop called Path of Professorship (PoP) for MIT’s graduate and postdoctoral women considering careers in academia… Read more at the Slice of MIT.
Confronting AlphaGo
The value of human teachers in the age of machines
In March 2016, world champion Go player Lee Sedol was defeated by the computer program AlphaGo in a five-game match. As someone who doesn’t play Go, follow professional Go, or study computer science, this shouldn’t have been a big deal to me. But it was. Go is incredibly complex: if every atom in our universe […]
